Friday, 4 January 2013

'A drawing of muchness'

An illustration of 'a drawing of a muchness' by JVL for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Artists' Choice Edition, 2009.

For this illustration I attempted to draw just a few items of ‘everything that begins with an M’,
such as ‘mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory and muchness’. The notion of
such a drawing was muttered by the Dormouse when he told Alice the story of the
three little sisters in the treacle well who were learning how to draw. In this
picture the March Hare presides over the illustration.

‘Memory’
is exemplified by a knot, as well as a depiction of a ‘hippocampus’, the name of the seat of memory in the brain, which
has the shape of a seahorse (the word hippocampus
is also the Greek word for seahorse). Conveying a notion of ‘muchness’ visually
has been attempted by incorporating addition, multiplication, and infinity signs.
On the top right hand side of the moon there is a hand in the act of drawing
and a pencil above it – a reminder that this is an illustration of a drawing!
And at the bottom we have a strip showing the phases of the moon - ‘M’ for moon, moon reflecting time’s
passage, and moon connected with madness and lunacy.

Here is the actual passage of text during the 'Mad Tea Party' in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: